The Fountains of Paradise

What Hacker News says

1. iainmerrickMay 2024
   That’s a nice idea but it would require a lot of elements to work in perfect synchrony to be really safe and reliable. In the foreseeable future, probably easier just to put physical bollards in.

   Your comment reminds me of a funny aside in Arthur C Clarke’s The Fountains of Paradise (wonderful novel, about the construction of a space elevator). A famous architect, designing the world’s longest and highest bridge, fights to avoid putting guard rails along the sides. His justification is a) cars are all computer-controlled and totally reliable in the book’s setting, so rails are unnecessary; some suspect it’s actually b) the bridge will look nicer without guard rails; or even darker, c) if a car does somehow go off-course, he’d prefer it doesn’t damage the bridge before plummeting half a mile into the sea.

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2. matthew16550Apr 2023
   For todays lucky 10,000.

   Arthur C Clarke wrote a great story about space elevators called "The Fountains of Paradise".

   https://arthurcclarke.org/site/legacy/fiction/fiction-sz/

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3. gostsamoJun 2021
   Dune (first book only), The Fountains of Paradise by Arthur Clark, Robert Heinlein (Starship Troopers, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Stranger in a Strange Land), Uplift Series by David Brim, The Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanly Robinson, Ann Leckies books are really interesting new sf.
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4. ghaffSep 2018
   For those looking for a popular culture examination of space elevators--albeit from a number of decades back--check out Arthur C. Clarke's The Fountains of Paradise. It also deals with some of the engineering issues, though again it's quite old.
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5. cstrossSep 2015
   Hard call: I'd have to say it all depends on the author's intent.

   Let's see ... at the time he wrote "Neuromancer" William Gibson had never used a computer -- he wrote it on a manual typewriter (and used the royalties to buy an Apple IIc). His creative vision was more one of social atomization and a particular aesthetic in a multi-national dominated future than it was informed by actual technology. Despite which, his creative vision of "cyberspace" got taken seriously enough as a visual metaphor that I remember sitting in on a debate at the W3C conference in 1996 between folks proposing that VRML should follow a Gibsonian model, and those who thought "Snow Crash" was the way forward. (Neal Stephenson's followers won the day. See also "Second Life", I guess ...)

   That's an example of "influencing". "Neuromancer" was very influential, but hardly predictive.

   Actual predictive SF is much, much rarer, but if we ever get a space elevator you can probably blame Arthur C. Clarke ("The Fountains of Paradise"), which is an old-school didactic hey-why-don't-we-do-this-the-numbers-check-out work of prediction in fiction drag. Or maybe Andy Weir's "The Martian".

   Written SF has traditionally been utter rubbish at predicting developments in the IT/computing sector, with notable exceptions -- for example the novella "True Names" by Vernor Vinge. (I've attempted this too but I'm not going to bang my own drum here.)

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6. everyoneFeb 2015
   I have strong opinions about this. My criteria for a book being science fiction and not fantasy is that is must be based on scientific thinking. The author must have done some work to determine whether whats happening in his book is at least plausible according to real science, and then work out the details of how it would actually function. So I regard most "science fiction" books and almost all "science fiction" films as really being fantasy. Essentially they are works of fantasy or dramatic fiction re-skinned with lasers and aliens instead of magic and goblins (to a great or lesser extent).

   So dune is a great book but it is 90% fantasy, there is only a little bit of research done by the author on desert ecosystems.

   My favourite real science fiction author is Arthur C clarke. some good books by him...

   earthlight

   the fountains of paradise

   islands in the sky

   the sands of mars

   rama

   songs of distant earth

   Also would recommend accelerando by Charles Stross and the mars series by Kim Stanley Robinson

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